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A return to the gold standard by the United States within the next five years now seems likely, because that move would help the nation solve a variety of economic, fiscal, and monetary ills, Steve Forbes predicted during an exclusive interview this week with HUMAN EVENTS.

“What seems astonishing today could become conventional wisdom in a short period of time,” Forbes said.

Such a move would...

INTERNATIONAL. Gold, which reached a record on May 2, may surge a further 30% by January as investors seek to protect themselves from “economic uncertainty,” according to Deutsche Bank AG.

“I’m bullish on gold despite its current levels,” Hal Lehr, Deutsche Bank’s managing director for cross-commodity trading, said in an interview in Buenos Aires. “It could reach US$2,000 an ounce in the next eight months.”

Investors including George Soros and John Paulson invested in gold as the ...

In 2010 India consumed about 2,800 tonnes of silver, this year’s consumption is expected to rise to 5,000 tonnes

Silver demand in China and India is set to rise 30 percent in 2011. Silver prices for July delivery surged $1.058, or 2.2 percent, to $48.599 an ounce. Silver prices have risen 5.5 percent this week and 57.1 percent in 2011...

Central banks that were net sellers of gold a decade ago are buying the precious metal to reduce their reliance on the dollar as a reserve currency, signaling demand that may extend a record rally in prices.

As developing countries accelerate purchases, gold may reach $2,000 an ounce this year, compared with a record of $1,538.80 yesterday in New York, said Robert McEwen, the chief executive officer of producer U.S. Gold Corp. Euro Pacific Capital’s Michael Pento, who correctly predicted gold’s highs for the past two years, forecast a 2011 high of $1,600...

In 1980 it was the Hunt brothers. In 1998 it was Warren Buffett. And in 2011?

For anyone unversed in the history of the silver market, those dates refer to market squeezes that caused surges in the silver price. The talk among some conspiracy-minded traders and analysts is that something similar could be happening today.

It is easy to see why: during the past 12 months the price of silver has risen 154 per cent, outpacing gold (32 per cent), wheat (65 per cent), oil (45 per cent), and indeed almost any investment you’d care to mention.

Perhaps the most telling measure, the ratio between the price of silver and that of gold (ie the price of an ounce of gold divided by the price of an ounce of silver) has dropped to 33.5 times – after averaging 60-70 during the past decade.

The last time the ratio fell even close to this level was in 1998, when Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway quietly accumulated a huge position in the silver market, driving prices up 90 per cent in a few months to what was then a 10-year high of $7.90. On Wednesday, silver hit $45.37....

Over the weekend, an announcement was made that the University of Texas endowment fund had decided buy and take delivery of $1 billion worth of gold. This was an absolutely huge development on multiple fronts.

First, the UT endowment fund’s gold purchase was a radical deviation from the standard institutional portfolio, the possibility of which we have considered for some time. Since UT has about $20 billion in assets, a $1 billion gold allocation would indicate 5% of its assets in gold. The standard institutional allocation to gold is 1%; a 5% allocation is a huge increase. If (or in our opinion, when) other institutions adopt a similar stance, the price of gold will skyrocket...

Edification is not the word that comes to mind when observing an interview with Larry Fink of Blackstone this morning on network financial news. It was inspirational if not humorous, and somewhat pathetic. Of course the interviewer treated him like royalty, when just a syndicate captain, a Made Man. As a cog within the US financial hierarchy, he was asked why Gold is approaching record price levels near $1500 per ounce. He gave his best 10-second answer, showing no depth of comprehension but an excellent grip of propaganda laced with simplistic distortion. He said...

The elimination of the dollar and the move to a gold backed reserve currency was the key focus at the BRIC conference that was held on April 14th in China.

The key to understanding the summit may be found in the joint statement, which refers to "the inadequacies and deficiencies of the existing international monetary and financial system...." Without question, this statement is about eliminating the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Therefore, the BRIC countries are asking for "the reform and improvement of the international monetary system, with a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty." ...

One by one, the countries of the emerging world are loosening the shackles with which they tried to prevent their currencies from appreciating. It is not that they care less about export competitiveness than they did even a few weeks ago. It’s that they now care more, much more, about inflation. And with rising prices of commodities, especially food and oil, stoking inflation, officials are deciding that allowing a currency to appreciate is a good way to relieve the pressure...

The US lacks a “credible strategy” to stabilize its mounting public debt posing a small but significant risk of a new global economic crisis, says the International Monetary Fund.

In an unusually stern rebuke to its largest shareholder, the IMF said the US was the only advanced economy to be increasing its underlying budget deficit in 2011 at a time when its economy was growing fast enough to reduce borrowing....